UBC Department Colloquium: Cristian Lenart

The connections between representations of complex semisimple Lie algebras and the geometry of the corresponding flag manifolds have a long history. Moreover, combinatorics plays an important role in the related computations. My talk is devoted to new aspects of this story. On the Lie algebra side, I consider certain modules for quantum affine algebras. I discuss their relationship with Macdonald polynomials, which generalize the irreducible characters of simple Lie algebras. On the geometric side, I consider the quantum K-theory of flag manifolds, which is a K-theoretic generalization of quantum cohomology. A new combinatorial model, known as the quantum alcove model, is also presented. The talk is based on joint work with S. Naito, D. Sagaki, A. Schilling, and M. Shimozono.